How to protect your online business from ransomware

I guess everyone has heard about ‘wanna cry’ ransomware – here is how to protect your business.

Ransomware is this lovely virus that get’s in your computer. It encrypts (scrambles) all your documents and data. Then you get a demand to pay money.

The people behind the ransomware are so smart, they can’t be caught by the cops – so no sense in asking the local cops or the Federal police. How come they are untouchable from the police:

they use digital currency which can’t be traced to a bank

they use the dark web where the authorities can’t identify them

The only way to fix ransomware once you get it is:

pay up – it’s generally around $1,000 but can be up to $4,000

recover a clean backup that is old enough before the ransomware attack.

You need to have pretty good backups as they don’t encrypt everything today, and demand the ransom tomorrow. They leave it a few days/weeks – to give you a chance to overwrite your backups with the encrypted version and copy the encrypted version to the cloud.